It takes a lot of machinery to make one shotgun shell.
Whether you are a hunter or just a competitive shooter, everyone enjoys blasting through a box of shells every so often. However, the process of how those shells are constructed is more complex than you might realize.
It turns out, it takes a lot of complex and fascinating machinery to get that box of shells from the factory floor to your hunting grounds.
In the video below, BobbyGuyFilms gets an invite to the Federal factory in Minnesota where he documents the making of shotgun shells from the raw materials to the finished product at your favorite sporting goods store.
Once again, the process of making ammunition proves to interesting and quite satisfying to watch from start to finish.
For those of you that do your own reloading, some of these steps probably are not surprising. It is interesting to see it done so quickly and on such a large scale. The process has obviously been fine-tuned over time to where they can produce thousands of shells a day.
Most interesting to us was the making of the plastic hulls themselves. That seems like the type of work many companies would outsource to some other factory or even another nation, but not Federal. They make all the hulls themselves. We had no idea they needed that much space to stretch, heat and thin the hulls down to the proper thickness.
We appreciate the fact that Federal has not forgotten their roots and that they are still operating out of the same building, albeit with some modern upgrades to the equipment to make the process even safer and more efficient for the workers.
One thing is for sure, the next time we're hunting or at the range, we'll be more appreciative of the process that makes the use of our shotguns possible!
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his YouTube channel.
NEXT: A SATISFYING LOOK AT HOW .22LR AMMO IS MANUFACTURED
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